4cr Plays – Trauma Team

The hardcore surgery simulation is, well, a tiny genre. Atlus doesn’t need to do much to keep that market tied down – it’s not like there is any competition. While they could have gotten away with simply releasing a new pack of operations to the hungry masses, the developers have put out their most ambitious game yet. Trauma Team finally takes the focus outside of the emergency room and expands the medical drama to the entire hospital. The result? One of the most compelling, meaty Wii releases to date.

At its core, Trauma Team is still a Trauma Center game. You’re still taking on the role of a doctor and cutting into patients. You still spend a lot of time selecting tools from a radial menu and poking at neon-colored bodies. This is pretty much where the similarities end. Gone are the tentacled insect-shaped viruses, and gone are the magical healing pentagrams. Right from the start, Trauma Team promises a more realistic take on the medical drama. Ok, not too realistic – this is still a world where one doctor can constantly smoke in the hospital, one dresses as a superhero in his free time, and one can hear the voices of the dead through her cell phone. Oh, and there are ninjas.

Fine, fine. It isn’t all that realistic. Still, as whacked out (and distinctly Japanese) as the plot is, the medical focus is centered somewhat our own world. The tiny monsters of the previous games have been replaced by real-world medical conditions. Admittedly, these have been somewhat exaggerated – if you have a dozen tumors in a single organ, I don’t think a doctor could do anything for you. Still, even the epidemic that emerges towards the end of the game is a distinctly more plausible plague.

This touch of realism is greatly appreciated, as Trauma Team’s focus is not just on emergency room, but on a number of vastly different medical disciplines. After three games, each with forty or fifty levels, the surgery aspect of the series has become a little played-out. It’s fun to remove your seven hundredth shard of glass, but there wasn’t a ton of innovation left in the entire concept. You can plainly see this in the few surgery levels in Trauma Team. They’re challenging (duh, this is a Trauma Center game) and a ton of fun, but they leave you feeling a big of deja vu. They’re really just the comforting hand guiding you into the rest of the game – the first-response, endoscopy, orthopedics, diagnostics, and forensics modes.

First-response will be the most familiar of the new modes to Trauma Center veterans. As Maria Torres, you’ll rush into disaster areas and automobile accidents; basically, areas where there will be a bunch of injured people with minutes to live. The operations in this mode are not really complex – your goal isn’t to cure the victims, just to keep them alive until help arrives. To do this, you’ll be given a small set of tools, such as forceps to remove shrapnel or tourniquets to stop blood flow. This mode is all about keeping calm and working efficiently. You’ll usually have four or five patients at a time, and it quickly becomes necessary to jump between them. You can’t always focus on finishing one before helping the others, so you need to be good at remembering where you’re at with each victim and which ones need help the most. To top all of this off, you’ll have to deal with environmental hazards like patients pierced on steel beams or live wires lying nearby. As you might imagine, things get pretty tense, which is what makes first-response one of my favorite modes. Even though there isn’t a ton of variety in what you do, the required combination of speed and efficiency makes each level pretty exciting.

While first-response will be pretty familiar to series veterans, endoscopy is an entirely new experience. As an endoscopist, you navigate a tube through the caverns and passages of the human body. In some ways, it feels like a first-person dungeon crawler – the only difference is that you use drains and syringes instead of swords. These levels feature some of the most interesting scenarios; in one level, you’ll even twist your camera through a collapsed building looking for survivors, guided by the sound of breathing. Unfortunately, the creativity shown in this mode is hobbled somewhat by the awkward controls. Moving through the current passage requires pointing in a direction while physically pushing the Wii Remote forward or backward. Of course, if you’re pushing forward and fully extend your arm, you have to remember to let go of the trigger before you move your arm, or you’ll lose your progress. Requiring the actual motion is technically the most logical motion, but in practice, the movement ends up being jerky and my arm was tired from having to constantly push the remote forward.

Orthopedics, the medicine of the skeleton and muscles, is far different from your standard emergency room surgery. This mode is focused more on precision than speed. Every move must be exact – you wouldn’t want to drive a rod through someone’s knee, would you? So, in this mode, the patient’s vitals are replaced with a series of “hearts.” Each mistake will cost you half of a heart. As you pull off maneuvers, you’ll earn more points based on your exact precision, and building up a massive point streak will net you a better grade. Not only are the rules a little different, but the procedures are as well. You’ll spend a lot of time repairing bones – doing things like smoothing out broken edges or securing fractures with metal plates. You’ll drill holes, hammer out tumors, and cut artificial bones out with a laser. This turned out to be one of my favorite gameplay types. The motion controls feel good, and for whatever reason, the operations just feel satisfying.

While the preceding four modes are all distinct, they do have clear roots in the surgery missions of the past few Trauma Center games. The remaining gameplay types, diagnostics and forensics, aren’t even close. They are basically first-person adventure games – far more in line with Phoenix Wright or Professor Layton than anything else.

In the diagnostician mode, you take on the role of the “Dr. House” character, Dr. Gabe Cunningham. Gabe, who is definitely my favorite character, is a sarcastic curmudgeon with a passion for solving puzzles – sound familiar? His job is to meet with patients and figure out exactly what is wrong with them. Of course, this process begins with an interview – you’ll ask patients to describe their condition. Like in the Phoenix Wright series, you need to press the interviewee for more information when you think that you’ve spotted a problem. This won’t give you everything, it’s equally important to keep your eyes on the patient’s body. Visual clues – like a twitching eye or a strange bruise – will tip you off to additional symptoms. While they are in your office, you can also listen in with the stethoscope. As you listen to the sound, you can flip over to the sound of a healthy respiratory system. If the two don’t match, you have another symptom on your hands.

At the same time, you can order a variety of examinations, including CT scans, X-Rays, and blood tests. These scans take the form of a hidden-object game; you’ll compare the patient’s results with the expected ones. Somewhere in there, you’ll find an anomaly. Once you’ve amassed a list of symptoms, it’s time to give a diagnosis. You’ll match symptoms against a list of likely disease candidates and try to find one that fits every requirement. The story isn’t necessarily over once you make that first diagnosis – the patient’s state will often change over time and a new diagnosis might be needed.

Interestingly, the diagnostician levels are actually pretty educational. Don’t know the difference between AST and ALT levels? You can click on the terms for a definition. Don’t know where the pituitary gland is, or what an enlarged one looks like? You will once you stare at a brain scan for ten minutes. When I was stuck (which was often – I’m awful at the hidden-object sections), I would even glance over the list of possible illnesses and search the internet for the symptoms to learn what I should be looking for. Sure, that’s borderline cheating, but I definitely learned a thing or two about medicine from the process. Trauma Team is definitely not a substitute for medical school, but I could see it being a neat study aid for first-year students.

I loved the diagnostician mode. Loved it. The cases are interesting, and picking out all of the right clues can be really challenging (just clicking on everything is the fastest way to fail). Learning about these medical conditions is fascinating, especially since the developers actually did their homework and realistically modeled the various symptoms that you encounter. Honestly, this is the only gameplay type in Trauma Team where I’d play an entire game’s worth of just this mission type.

The final gameplay mode, forensics, takes you outside of the hospital. Naomi, who returns from Trauma Center: Second Opinion, uses her knowledge of medicine to solve murders. You’ll investigate crime scenes, interview witnesses (again, looking for contradictions ala Phoenix Wright), and inspect corpses for vital clues. As you amass clues, you’ll need to combine them to form pieces of vital evidence. You’ll need to pay careful attention to the details – you will be frequently quizzed on them. Once you’ve collected enough evidence, you’ll get the chance to face the accused and lay out the case.

As much as I loved the diagnostician mode, I just couldn’t get into the forensics levels. Some of the interface decisions are baffling. For instance, each witness recordings has a bulleted list of “points of interest,” which is updated throughout the case. However, no matter which one you click on, you are brought to the first statement in the same recording. Also, while the diagnostician levels follow a natural flow of logic, the forensics levels frequently leave you with no clue on how to proceed. Even if you have clues that logically fit together, you can’t combine them until both clues are at the right “level” (you upgrade clues by combining them with other clues). You can have the FBI analyse certain pieces of evidence, but not others, and you aren’t always told which fit and which don’t. As a result, the forensics levels often break down into trying every clue until something works.

The Trauma Center series could only go so far with surgery while still keeping the formula fresh. Now, the developers could have still taken the lazy route. They could have probably just put out another three or four games of the same thing, and they probably would have gotten away with it. Instead, they dug in and put together an insanely ambitious game. Trauma Team does wonders for the franchise by expanding into a number of completely unique forms of medicine, and amazingly, the majority of them are fantastic. None of the modes feel half-baked – each could be expanded into their own full game without getting old. While I have little quibbles with a few of the modes (especially forensics and endoscopy), the end product is easily one of the best games on the Wii and my main complaint is simply that there isn’t enough of it. I’d love to have had another five missions for each game type. Still, Trauma Team is a meaty game with about twenty hours of content, and far more once you start getting into the excellent co-op mode. It’s a must-buy for any fan of the series, or really, just about anybody who wants a game that takes full advantage of what the system has to offer without feeling like a tech demo.

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